Where is the Centre of the World? Between your own two feet.

I’m sat in the ‘Ponder’ at my parents home in West Sussex, where I’m based for my Winter Holiday visit to the UK. The wind is whooping around and the blasts of rain on the glass roof and walls sound like pebbles on a tin roof.  Mum and Dad are in the cosy living room through the glass door beyond, and I ask them why they call it the Ponder. I am not surprised that they have two different answers, but this reminder of their opposing anchors for reality makes me smile.

“It’s a place you go to Ponder the great mysteries of life” sighed Dad from his desk near the window.

“There used to be a pond there,” said mum sleepily from her armchair.

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“Where is the centre of the world? Between your own two feet”

This Celtic saying from “The Celtic Book of Days” by Caitlin Matthews, which I first read in the 1990s, has resurfaced in my mind. I though on first reading it I was self-important and egocentric. I was in my early 20s and like many of my age before me I was struggling with, and felt suffocated by, the day-to-day demands of existence. I had dropped out of university and had to find a job I didn’t hate, a place to live, and food to eat with the financial planning that these demanded. I was in love but didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant in practice. Instead I had bigger concerns: the background fear of nuclear war in the 1980s, heightened by the Chernobyl disaster in 1985, still persisted; acid rain and the ozone layer,  genetically modified foods and the growth of the World Trade Organization painted a picture of a world out of control. I knew the answers could never be found in late 20^th century suburban life. Look at all these people, absorbed in the worlds between their own two feet!

Instead, I began to travel, sometimes alone on my motorbike, sometimes with partners and friends, backward in time. I would visit the stone monuments and hill forts of the earliest inhabitants of Britain: Stonehenge of course but many more big and small- Avebury, the Nine Maidens, Hetty Pegler’s Tump, Lanyon Quoit. I had an urge to discover who these people were and what they did, when life was simpler and less busy. It was the beginning for me of a curiosity about the relationship between people and the land and, having rejected the stultifying confines of the Christian church, the start of a journey to find a connection to a unifying sense of purpose. Somewhere out in the land was, as Dylan Thomas wrote, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

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The particularities of place are juxtaposed by the generality of no place or everywhere. Is everywhere the averaging out of all difference, or is everywhere an emergent property holding together all the specific details or context of all the places, without losing their boundaried and vernacular individuality? The political landscape, David Goodhart argues, is now “the separation of those who come from ‘Somewhere’ – rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated – and those who could come from ‘Anywhere’: footloose, often urban, socially liberal and university educated”

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In May 2018 I left the UK for Ontario, Canada. I’m a Permanent Resident, spending the overwhelming majority of my time here. During COVID, I did not return for over two years, until Christmas 2021 when at last I could see my family again. Despite the similarities in the cultures of the UK and Canada, it has not been easy to settle. However, it has given me the opportunity to think about what it means to belong to a place, how one might belong to a new place, and if you can belong to two-or multiple places at once.

As individuals, we can only ever meet the world through our senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing- (and also abilities we never suspected), and so our perception is a function of our own complex cognitive process. The worlds centre is therefore indeed between our own two feet. The things we find in the landscape on our individual journeys bring forth a particular type of world, but also the attention we bring to the world shapes what we see.

“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are”

Anais Nin, Seduction of The Minotaur 1961

“It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find”.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (p. 133). Yale University Press.

To belong TO a place it seems to me that you need to be as fully IN the landscape as possible, interacting with it as closely as possible, and at times giving it your FULL attention.

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On my return to England this Christmas I have been out walking again in the South Downs where my folks live. I love walking. Its always a bit unsettled at first: adjustment of clothing, finding a pace, shifting focus between things close and far away. But then something happens, and your heartbeat sets the pace, and something like a wordless poem emerges. Sometimes I am completely in my head, riffing off the sights: a windmill, an enormous ash tree, a fine hawthorn hedgerow, ivy berries. Each sets my mind off on its own track and the rhythm of my feet and the landscape are like the drone of bagpipes behind the main melody in my head.

Then I bring it home and there’s just my steady feet walking and my breath in and out and everything is now, and now, and now. Sometimes, when I feel the mud and chalk beneath my feet, the wind on my face and the sounds of crows and a distant tractor, I can even feel like I can perceive the whole of the landscape at once-not just what my eyes settle on. Then I’m in the drone and it feels like the background hum left over from The Big Bang. A flock of jackdaws bank and wheel in the dying sun, looking for a place to roost and in them I glimpse everything there is to see: an endless pattern of cycles, a story of a journey from nowhere to somewhere and back again.

I’m reminded of the Welsh word ‘cynefin’ (kuh-nev-in) with one of its definitions being “place of your multiple belongings”. Often on walks, Cynefin means for me the subtle shifts in perception that reveals a different landscape from one moment to the next, like the harmonies of a polyphonic song.

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On a day in December I took my dog Magpie on a long walk. Depending on your mood, there are many tracks to take around the farm. Sarah and I had just got back from town, and Magpie was eager for a walk. As the merest hint of snowflakes fell with the dusk, we headed up the muddy track between the pines and the barn into the bowl. Mags quickly found a stick and we paused in the bowl to play; an energetic tussle before I gripped his collar to let him go, then threw the stick out into the long grass. There was not much long grass left however, the chickens having done their best in their first year in the bowl, with only patches of unpalatable goldenrod left. We are looking forward to seeing what new floral map emerges in the Spring now that the grip of the dominant grasses has been broken over this patch of ground. Its common for fields like these on old farms with a legacy of high fertility to be dominated by a few competitive grasses. It only takes a small disturbance- chicken grazing, a wildfire- to upset the cart with a furious flush of forbs and a riot of color through the year.

We left the bowl and headed up the track to the fields on the slopes of this western end of the Oak Ridges Moraine, through the remnant forest patches flanking Cold Creek and up a steep trail to the Upper Field. I paused to survey the vegetable beds now tidy and quiet and heading into their winter sleep after a fulsome spring and summer of work. Three chicken tractors lay idle near the edge of the North Woods, unused this year because of the threat of bird flu.

As I walked up from the creek, I decided that my walk would take me into the North Woods to pay my respects to ‘Sister Oak’ and ‘Brother Stone’. I was first introduced to Sister Oak, when Sarah and I walked up to the North Woods back in 2017 on one of my visits over to Ontario while I was still based in the UK. A splendid red oak with a bole that begins broadly but quickly becomes slender, rising almost branchless at first before sending out two spectacular main branches and exploding in twisty complexity. I saw a tall slender woman in a gown with flowing edges, arms raised aloft and hair caught by the wind. Aunt Debbe was first perplexed when I told her, she always saw a male figure, but we agreed that both interpretations were fine, although her’s was right.

What was clear was Sister Oak- sometimes more frequently now Grandmother Oak, was an important tree in the small section of woodland that grew on the highest point of Mount Wolf Farm, itself perched on the side of the Oak Ridge Moraine, but was part of a much larger woodland extending across the property boundary to the North. I had moved to Ontario permanently, and had already thought of Sister Oak as the heart of the North Woods, a friend and guide to my new home, when I “discovered” Brother Stone a little ways downslope. The stone, which sat as tall as my waist and twice as broad, was one of many glacial erratics on the farm- a remnant of the Canadian shield shattered off by the movement of ice sheets 12,000 years ago and deposited to the south amongst different geology.

As I walked on, feelings of guilt seemed to emerge. Why, if my relationship to these two elements in the landscape of the farm held some significance for me, was I only deciding to visit them on a whim while out for a dog walk? This is not always the case: when I want or need to be in a sacred or ritual space I come here- at significant celebrations during the Wheel of the Year, when I am stressed or when I need to connect to something that’s more than myself. I wonder whether I am paying lip service to a remnant of a druidic spiritual pathway that I flirted with once in my 20s and then discarded in favor of a paramor who was more eager to give up her favours to a hungry mind in search of answers: science. I think that what underlay my guilt was a sense that I sought out Oak and Stone only on my terms. I am not abiding with this place by giving something back: a commitment, a sacrifice, an offering of my time; a measuring of significance by an act driven by something more than my own immediate wants, needs and desires.

Some might say that this is the problem with any spiritual or religious pathway that doesn’t have a long and abiding tradition. There is no sacrifice on behalf of the acolyte when and how you practice a spiritual pathway. One must marry into the Way, for better or for worse. Today, many of us are simply window-shopping to in spiritual malls

As I reflect further on this experience It seems to me that part of what belonging to place means is a reciprocation. Belonging is not simply a function of time, but also requires commitment. You may want something from the land, but it wants something from you too.

What are your gifts to the places you live?

For today I manage to satisfy myself with my reflection. I’m going easy on myself, and enjoying my  insights and realize that they reveals something quite profound:  Brother Stone and Sister Oak are my teachers.